Circling Around

Greetings to all.

First of all YAY it's my day off! and very welcome it is. Nothing like being a drone bee, a cog in the machine, a wage slave. Thank you Lord for a job. I pay my bills, I live in not my car...I own a car that has new tires on it as of last Thursday. So yes, a job is a good thing and I am GLAD TO BE AWAY FROM THAT PLACE FOR TWO DAYS!

 And my cat, and Wylie's cat, and Wylie love me. And others do, too.

Joey gave us a very cool circle string this week to play with, and a fun tangle: Gnarly. But we'll come back to that.

I wanted to display a few pages from my sketchbook. I found a terrific tangle pattern website called
pattern collections I think the Shading Zentangle page on FB is where I first linked into pattern collections.com but when I did I really liked it. One of the features there is a tutorial series called Grid Journey, packed with ideas on playing with grid patterns.

 The first "lesson" is similar to the seed grid idea that Maria and Rick talk about at their website:  Take the elements of a grid, whatever lines and curves are inside ONE square of the grid, and playing with that. Turn the page, put them all in the same corner for a new type of pattern, or reverse/mirror them.

This is the  pattern Blooming Petal which I played around with, using those ideas. Isn't it something, how different the same pattern can look, depending on how you put them together?

The second lesson is about making a grid pattern into a ribbon...thusly:

 Backsplash, Clem, Egyp, and 3-D Room, as ribbons. Neat, eh?











Okay so that fun website. today I plan on getting into lesson 3 in the Grid Journey.

Other sketchbook stuff, just random lines and forms.

 Got my Eni Oken shading book out and played around with it.
See that section of Skye? and I love the little flower bud I doodled. Shading does amazing things to a piece of art.

Inspired by a Vivian Maier photo

Playing with Loopy Blossom. This has turned out to be a fun pattern for me. There is plenty of scope for creativity here. I wonder if I can do that grid seed thing with it. It' is kind of a grid based pattern, but not rigid...hmmm.








Now, without further adieu...ado?...ehem. without further ado,

Joey's Challenge

A large circle, with a narrow circle inside of it, and the pattern Gnarly.

Because I had my pencils out for another piece to color...oh! wait. this is funny. A co worker stopped by my cubicle, saw the myriad works displayed and said "oh, you're into that coloring craze" and I said...Well, yeah But I made those and THEN colored them. hahaha. He was duly impressed...

Anyway, I had been busy coloring in a page that I didn't like, just plain AND with shading on my mind, it was easy to choose the way I should go with this challenge. Gnarly is shaded subtly with cool grays and the center is hollibaugh, also minimally enhanced with shading and each section colored in boldly with jewel tones. Gee wiz, I ended up liking this. very satisfying to do, and I think it's fun to look at. The only thing I haven't decided yet is, do I do anything with the background behind gnarly. There is not so much as a cast shadow there. But this way it looks airy and light, doesn't it. Hmm.

A Touch of Red

Good morning to all.


The Diva challenges us this week to use red in our tangle art. At first I was indifferent, without any ideas about what to do, and instead started playing around with a few lines and curves, and came up with this kind of spikey flower vine,

Note the Einstein quote

This is just a page in my sketchbook, on the bottom of which I started tangling. It reminds me of lichen or trumpits, and I like it. Seems like it might make a border, right?


The other pattern there on a grid is Sundy.









So I made it a sort of header for some other tangles...Frickle and Fronds. Then it wanted to come down into the other patterns, which it did.




When I had finished that, I realized...if I color in the spiky flowers in red, this piece would make an entry! In fact, I liked the piece itself as a potential coloring page. But I left it with just the red bits. And didn't like it! oops.


Thing is, I had the "header" separate from the rest of the piece, while other bits of the spike flower thing were wandering around inside the piece, looking much more at home. The border or frame part didn't look like it belonged.

Well I fixed that, and started over, with the right idea in mind.

And this is what I came up with.

this one goes on my cubicle wall at work

I like it better with the spikey flowers all through the other tangles, though the pattern would be a very good border too. So I'm going to be playing with it some more.

Is it too much like trumpits or lichen, for me to claim an original? Because I love it, don't want to "claim" it if there's something out there already.

Circle Time

A short post about a double entry

Joey is challenging us these days with circle strings.

last week's challenge was three circles within a circle, and using Socc was our challenge.

Socc is rather a challenge all on its own, and I wasn't in the mood last week, but today I polished one off. Socc...hmmm...

anyway, this is what I came up with for Joey's Challenge 117

Socc all around, with bales inside the smaller circles. After putting lines down, I decided to leave one globe, which would have been even better just smooth without the grid. Oh well.


and this week's challenge was a circle inside a circle, Maryhill not to be used in the smaller circle.

Thumbnail in the center circle, is another pattern that blossoms with shading, so it fits well with Maryhill. The "petals" of Maryhill, I tweaked a little bit, alternating "convex" with "concave" but that didn't come out as noticeable. This was a fun one, as I am PMSing something fierce today and all the repetition did me good.

Oh! almost forgot. I got my copy of Ben Kwok's book Wildlife Designs. In case anyone doesn't know, Ben Kwok creates outlines of various critters, and household items such as high top tennis shoes or old fashioned phones, then puts grids inside. The idea is then to fill up the wild animal with tangles. And color if  you want.

So, this was my first Ben Kwok design, a fox.
This was harder to do than you'd think. I repeatedly referred to the samples in the book, for inspiration. But in the end, I like what I came up with.

pre coloring

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flux on the round

this is a slow tangle week for me, though I have been having LOADS of fun with Skye

pre shading

shaded

yes, this is Skye...can you see it? I had so much fun doing this! I thought the shading would be tedious, but I loved doing it.

And this is my entry for Joey's circular flux challenge.

I dribbled some berry juice on a tile, like ages ago, and set it aside. When the challenge from Joey came along, I figured I'd do it on that stained tile. It is Flux and Hollibaugh in purple micron .05, shaded with violet prismacolor, and a few highlights in white gelly roller. It sort of looks like a laurel crown tossed on a wood pile.

Oh my, Skye!

Once I got the hang of it, I find Skye a MOST DELIGHTFUL pattern to play with.

My sketchbook

I put it on curves, did single motifs, and tried several ways of shading. I even made a row of Skye that looked metallic. Very cool!

(the metallic looking one is right here on the <<< rightmost of this picture)








So after all that practice, I decided to make a big piece, in my large sketchbook that has WONDERFUL 98 wt paper

This is before shading. 

I put Skye in here many times, some in rows, and some individual motifs. There are several with openings (a la' Ellish) that I JUST LOVE!!! It is so cool looking with the open spaces. Other patterns are hamail, florz, pineapple, flux, tipple, perls, printemps, and my hamail tangleation, along with a few spirals here and there.

Pineapple is the pattern on the right, it uses a leaflet outline with just shading. It is a Neal Burley pattern, and I've drastically adapted it so it is nothing but lines and shading.

I think this needs something more, something to tie it all together.

One other little tidbit, I want to do it again, but it involves a LOT of tiny little detail...

I was aiming to get those fibonacci spirals that are found in the center of sunflowers. I think I know what to do, now that I spent a few hours on this. Maybe I'll do it again some day.